I mentioned in my post yesterday that I had been trying to fit Bernard Buxton into my family tree; well I can reveal that he is my third cousin once removed. His 2x Great Grandfather – Henry Buxton (1824 – 1900) is my 3x Great Grandfather.

If anyone has ever wondered about how difficult it is to commit identity theft let me just say that from starting with no more information than is displayed on his company website I now know his date of birth & marriage, his fathers date of birth and marriage, his Grandfathers date of birth & the dates of his two marriages (although I already new about the one). All of this information I obtained from sources that are in the public domain and freely available.

I must apologise for the lack of updates to both this blog and the website of late but my spare time has been occupied by other projects. Some family history related and one that is not.

On the family history side I have at long last been doing some more research into my Buxton tree, or more specifically if and how I am related to Bernard Buxton the founder of Buxtons Ltd (the chainsaw place – if you are local you’ll understand), which I pass every time I visit the archives in Stafford but have not visited although I Keep thinking about it.

Also on the family history side and also related to Rushton Spencer, I’ve been working on the genealogy of the Parish again, it is slow going at the moment because until I have all of the registers transcribed I have incomplete data to work with.

The other project occupying my time is a website makeover for one of the leading West Midlands based injection moulding companies. Their current website is a bit long in the tooth and in need of an update, also due to the design practices of the time, the SEO (search engine optimisation) is pretty much nonexistent. So my role is to provide them with a greater web presence and improved rankings on the major search engines, if I improve the rankings on Google then improvement will follow on the rest.

In the near future I am also planning to make major alterations to www.rushtonspencer.info, the visual design is not going to change just yet but there is going to be a radical restructuring of the site itself which, unfortunately will result in some major disruption for a few weeks while the search engines update their indexes of the website. If you link to the site using the url – that is http://www.rushtonspencer.info – then you should experience no disruption but, if you link to specific pages then be prepared for the 404 error messages (page not found).

The reasons for the change are two fold one is to make maintenance easier, for example by using a small snippet of php code the copyright information will update itself each year with out me having to change the date and upload the whole of the site. Secondly I want to improve usability by, for example implementing some sever side programming that will highlight the keywords used in a search, to illustrate this if you look at this page you will see that the search terms are highlighted, this is something I wish to implement on my website.

The upshot of which is that I need to change the file extensions from .htm to .php which will of course break all of the incoming links to the site. At the same time to prevent a major disruption again, I will be changing the internal structure of the site so that, for example, instead of having to type http://www.rushtonspencer.info/Pages/HeatonHome.htm to find information relating to Heaton you will only need to type http://www.rushtonspencer.info/heaton to arrive at the same page, this degredation of the urls should again result in an improved user experience.

Don’t worry though I will make an announcement before the changes happen, and I will need to inform some of the websites linking to mine so they can also update their links.

Although I do not hunt (I am in fact a poor horseman, although, I have been told that I look good on a horse), I respect a persons right to hunt and as such wish to see a repeal of the hunting act, which has very little to do with foxes anyway and was to appease the Labour Party old guard as hunting is something done by country folk who due to the fact that they live in the country are or so the argument goes Tories.

Anyway academics specialising in animal welfare have concluded that hunting with dogs must cause a degree of suffering to individual animals, but that the ban on hunting with dogs is not likely to improve the welfare of the quarry species, there is also concern that the alternative methods left available. The Middle Way Group’s research “Wounding Rates of Shot Foxes” which following a long peer-review process was published in the scientific journal Animal Welfare, showed high wounding rates involved in shooting foxes and has raised serious doubts over anti-hunting claims that shooting is the humane alternative to hunting with dogs. Unfortunately this led Jackie Ballard, Director General of the RSPCA, to state that

“There was not absolute proof that wounded foxes suffer.”

Understandably vets stated that they were “astonished” by the revelation, and Lembit Öpik MP, co-chair of the Middle Way Group, said,

“We have seen evidence from the Burns Enquiry, Portcullis House Hearings and our own shooting study ignored by the anti-hunting groups. Now we see the world’s premier animal welfare organisation defying all reason. This is not just twisting science to suit a case, but also common sense!”

The High Court hearing of the Crawley & Horsham hunt and the 88 farmers and landowners across whose land they hunt has been adjourned for a second time this week.

It had been hoped to obtain an injunction against Simon and Jaine Wild and their West Sussex Wildlife Protection Group on the grounds of harassment, nuisance and trespass which would be in place before 1st September 2008 in time for the start of the hunting season, as these animal rights activists who have targeted hunts and shoots across the South East for decades, have in recent years focussed on the Crawley and Horsham, often causing considerable anxiety to hunt supporters and farmers. The hunt has logged 269 incidents of trespass and harassment carried out by the Wilds and their associates in the last two years alone.

Evidence which includes video footage and witness statements was originally to be presented to the High Court on Monday 28th July however, Mr. Justice Cranston, a Solicitor-General in Tony Blair’s Government, stood aside after 30 minutes of legal argument when lawyers representing the hunt & farmers raised formal objections. When he was MP for Dudley North in 2000 Mr. Justice Cranston described fox-hunting as ‘not a sport, but a barbaric and cruel activity’ in a statement to a local newspaper, the Stourbridge News.

He then went on to ‘welcome the chance to vote…and consign this brutal practice to the dustbin of history’.

Two years later, in December 2002, he signed an Early Day Motion, presented by the late Tony Banks MP, which urged Parliament to ban hunting, on the basis that ‘only a total ban on hunting will be acceptable’

The cases was then scheduled to be heard on 20th October 2008, however three days into the hearing Mr Justice King adjourned the case pending a “case management conference” within five or six weeks, followed by a resumption of the full trial of the action at a later date – possibly in the Spring. The adjournment had nothing to do with the strength of evidence produced by the Crawley & Horsham, and they remain confident that when that evidence is eventually presented to the Court, an injunction will be granted.

Victory in this case, will ensure that one small hunt in West Sussex can carry on without harassment and that every hunt and shoot across the country has a recourse in law should they become the target of the same sort of animal rights campaign.

Hunt supporters from around the world have rallied round this week and given an overwhelming amount of support to the Crawley and Horsham Hunt Injunction fund. As well as phenomenal support from UK donors, donations from hunts in France and Portugal, as well as supporters from Gibraltar, Germany, Australia and America have made generous contributions towards the fund.

If anyone wishes to offer financial support however great or small, especially as this case is about much more than hunting, and concerns a person’s civil liberties and freedom to take part in lawful activities without the fear of victimisation and intimidation then they can do so here using paypal.

At long last another five years of baptisms and burials have been put online today following a long overdue visit to the archives last Friday.

Following on from the last post about grey squirrels I was delighted to read in the Shooting Times (9 October 2008) that the Red Squirrel Protection Partnership have culled over 20 000 [20 246 since January 2007] grey squirrels in Northumberland.

The Partnership which was founded in 2006 and to quote their website

“… consists of a group of individuals committed to saving the red squirrel from extinction in Northumberland. To do this we are building a network of monitors who can scout designated areas of land in red squirrel zones for any signs of grey squirrel incursions. Based on this work, any greys spotted in these zones will be trapped and dispatched by a trained and regulated team, stopping the threat of the grey squirrel spreading. We have received funding from the local Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs in Northumberland.”

While reading this week I finally discovered why when dealing with pre-decimalization currency pence is abbreviated to ‘d’, as in l. s. d. Well if like me it is something that has puzzled you then the answer is pence is abbreviated to ‘d’ for denarius or denarii (a Roman coin), shilling is abbreviated to ‘s’ for solidus (again a Roman coin) and pond is abbreviated to ‘l’ for libra (a pond in weight).

“Fox-hunting, as traditionally practised, became an illegal activity during Tony Blair’s second term. Hundreds of hours of parliamentary effort were devoted to its extermination. MPs bent over backwards to criminalise an outdoor sport pursued by some of the most upstanding members of the community. The ban was ridiculous and impractical and it tarnished Parliament’s own standing.

“The Government minister who pushed through the hunting ban? A dismal little doormat called Alun Michael.

“To look at, he is not a striking proposition, a careworn creature with the hunched shoulders and lank hair of a natural loser. Alun Michael is an authentic middler, a worker bee, putty in the hands of more confident colleagues.

“On hunting, he got his way. Ill-informed, emotive arguments defeated common sense. But he still looked flea-bitten as he led the canter towards the ban. He still looked miserable, mangy, weak.”

I was reading about the plight of the red squirrels in the Natural Lore column of the Shooting Times (18th September 2008) and it appears that:

“The first authenticated record of the grey squirrel being released in England was by T. V. Brocklehurst in the grounds of Henbury Park, Cheshire, in 1876.”

Reading this made me think first of the Brocklehursts of Swythamley, and then of Captain Courtney Brocklehurst who at the start of the Second World War released the wallabies that lived for many years on the Roaches in the Peak District. A quick search of Google Maps shows Henbury to be near Macclesfield and so there is a possability that T. V. Brocklehurst and Capt. Courtney Brocklehurst are related by blood and not just by introducing non native species to the British countryside.

While searching for more information on T. V. Brocklehurst I was dismayed to read on the Times website that stupid sentimentality has led to a change in the law meaning that after obtaining a license it is now possible to release trapped grey squirrels back into the wild. Until last year anyone catching a grey squirrel was required by law to kill it to help preserve the native red squirrel. Natural England the Governmental quango for nature said the change had been made to reflect public sentimentality.

The House of Lords with its usual wisdow called into question the wisdom of treating grey squirrels humanely. England has about two million grey squirrels and the figures given show that 13,337 were exterminated in Northumberland alone last year

“If you give licences for six squirrels, presuming that three are male and three are female, in no time at all you will have 60 squirrels. After that, my mind boggles,”

Baroness Butler-Sloss, until recently the most senior female judge in England and Wales, also advocated extermination.

Personally I think that all grey squirrels should be shot on sight, and if it is safe to do so anyone with a spade, air rifle or shot gun should show them no mercy.

“SG”, a contributor to The Trap Man website, described his technique for dispatching captured grey squirrels:

“Place jute bag round end of cage . . . pull door up and open – squirrel rushes into bag. Grabbed end of bag to assure its closure and trapped vermin. Try to hold it down and bang away with hammer.”

If anyone fancies ago at trapping a few grey squirrels then it is suggested that the best bait is peanut butter, nutty chocolate spread or dry cat food, but please have a spade to hand incase you are successful.